Photography Thailand Forum

[bjorn slis]

Question: How do you store your old images.
After about 10 yrs of digital photography I have about 1.5 TB of images, most of them I don't use very often.
The last 5 years I have stored them on external harddrives, (before on cds and dvds) but these things are very unreliable, most of them don't last much longer than a yr. or so, I have WD, Lacie, Seagate etc.
Now I have a double backup system (3x2TB), but it would be great if I could just put the older ones somewhere on a disk/drive or some other medium so that I know they are stored somewhere safe.
(online is not really an option, it would take months to upload them all)
How do you guys do that ?

[David Salmanowitz]

Bjorn--I am a big fan of Drobo. http://www.datarobotics.com/  Started to use one when it first came out, price has dropped since then though now with hard drive scarcity due to flooding the prices and availability of hard drives has been affected around the world. One of the beauties of this system is you can mix and match drives in the drive bays. A 500GB, a 2 TB, a 1 TB, whatever. Your data is always protected and when there is a problem with a drive it lets you know, you remove that drive and replace it with a good one, and it starts to transfer data to the new drive. I think one of the most important things is to have a copy of your data off site--as if in only one location and disaster (flood, cyclone, earthquake, whatever...) struck then all your images are gone. For archiving and storing photos Drobo works for me, it gets a 

[Gregg Spradling]

Great solution David. I'm a big fan of Drobo, but I don't have one. Did you buy yours in Thailand?

I just use multiple external and internal drives. I have a backup of my main drive internal to my pc. I have 2 external drives with a backup as well, one being off site.

Great point about off site storage. If you really want to safeguard your data, you really need to have one source that is not on site. The recent floods is a perfect example of this.

[David Salmanowitz]

Gregg--No, I had bought the Drobos in USA on previous visits. I have seen them in Singapore, and I see they are also sold in Malaysia but did not see a link to Thailand.

[YannickW]

Hello Bjorn

I'm using the online service Backblaze (http://www.backblaze.com/) + an external 3GB HD as a TimeMachine drive + 2 other external HD (one attached on my computer, one somewhere else) that I swap every 1-2 months.

Backblaze is great, unlimited storage for 5$/month but the files must be online on your computer, otherwise it gets deleted from the server after 30 days.

[bjorn slis]

Thanks Guys,
Yannick, online storage is not an option with current internet speeds.
A Drobo is a possibility but it would still mean I have all my old files on drives connected to my computer I would like to be able to store them somewhere else, and just keep my "current" files on a drive that is connected.

[Gregg Spradling]

When you say connected to my computer, you mean the internal drive(s)? Are you saying you only want files you are working with on an internal hard drive and the rest stored somewhere else?

You might also look into a NAS (network attached storage) device. There are many ready to go models out there (no need to build one yourself anymore) and fairly cheap in price. They have a few advantages such as being faster than USB based storage and the ability to access it easily from the network. You would still have access to original files via the network, but they would not be on the pc itself.

If you go with a NAS, Drobo, or whatever, I would highly suggest making another backup in addition to the originals and ones you are storing. RAID (and the quasi-RAID in the Drobo) is good, but many things can go wrong like multiple drive failures, failure of the RAID array to rebuild upon drive failure, current spikes that fry everything, etc...

It's kind of clunky, but they have drive cradles that you can just plug a drive into and then store it somewhere.

I basically use the drive cradle concept and write rules with Microsoft SyncToy to backup files from certain folders to certain drives. Then once done, I store the drives somewhere away from the pc.

[David Salmanowitz]

Yannick--be very wary of online storage. Companies come and go and often when they go so do all one's images. Just ask all the people who used Digital Railroad a bit over 2 years ago I think it was. Even if one does use online storage one also needs to have multiple backups for protection, as and as I had said previously one set of copies in another location. BTW, if you are using Time Machine with Lightroom don't. Unless it has been rectified there is a conflict as Lightroom has things going on in the background that Time Machine does not see.
Bjorn--I use my Drobos for archiving and storage. For working on stuff it is either on external drives with a laptop or will be on big internal drives when I get a new desktop. With a laptop especially performance takes a big hit when it is filled to 50% or more of capacity.

[bjorn slis]

I was really trying to find something to store files on permanently, now it is all stored on harddrives, and whether you put them in NAS or just a simple USB box, they are very unreliable, especially when copying large amounts of data. I guess nothing is really a 100% reliable so a drobo might be the way to go especially because I also work on different computers. And then do a backup on simple external drives that I keep off site.

[David Salmanowitz]

Bjorn--one great thing about a Drobo is you have just one HD icon on your desktop, instead of lots of daisy chained assorted drives and their icons. I know the original one I had bought was only USB and was slow--but really did not make much difference to me as it was only for archiving and storage, not working on stuff. Later editions  have Firewire 800 and well as eSata, so they are speedier but I still do not use it except for storage. You using multiple computers I think a Drobo would be great, as when you hooked it up to each computer you could transfer what you wanted. Really does work as advertised. 2 or 3 years ago had a drive go bad--knew this as when I woke up there was a flashing light. Had my coffee, waited for Fortune Town to open up, went and bought another HD, inserted it into the Drobo, and it started writing data to the new drive; while all of the data was still protected on the remaining drives.

[bjorn slis]

Thanks for the info David, if I can get one I'll hook it up to my Airport extreme, that way I can use it as a network drive.
If anybody knows where I can buy it in Thailand, pls let me know.

[Marc Schultz]

One thing worth suggesting is that whatever form of hard backup storage you choose, I would store it in a fireproof and/or flood proof box. You should also have a second set of backups offsite as a couple people mentioned already as a crash recovery site. Another place you could store a set would be in a safe deposit box in a bank. Since Thailand is not so secure it seems at this point because of flooding, I might suggest storing them in a safe deposit box at a bank in a regional country like Hong Kong or Singapore instead. Flights from Thailand to those countries are very inexpensive and both are extremely secure and stable countries.

[David Salmanowitz]

Multiple copies in different locations is really the key. Last year read about some guy in Texas I think that had stuff in a safe--all was fine till a tornado hit his area and the safe ended up in a riverbed a few blocks away. Not sure if all was ok with that one. Bank vaults would seem like the ideal secure spot but not always the case. One needs to make sure the bank does not have electromagnetic locks on the vault doors as some banks do. Heard about a photographer a few years back who had all his hard drives wiped clean--hopefully he had copies in another location.

[Khun Hans]

All good points here. In particular to store copies somewhere else. But one advise from my experience: don't store at a place of a girl friend/ex wife. That can go terribly wrong like a hurricane/ flood etc.
I will take in consideration what David said and it should be available here in Thailand: http://www.90degreesolution.com/droboall.html